New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square
Fourteen years after the Louisiana Purchase, the city restricts the Sunday gatherings of enslaved and free people of African descent to a single plot of ground beyond Rampart Street. The measure is a restriction, and its effect on this Journey is the opposite of the South Carolina drum ban: by licensing the gatherings in one place rather than prohibiting them, it kept African ensemble drumming publicly audible in a North American city for another two generations. Observers of the following decades describe crowds in the hundreds and name the bamboula among the dances.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Congo Square, New Orleans · site · United States
- New Orleans · city · United States
- The West African drum ensemble · cultural practice · West and West-Central Africa · not located
- Colonial prohibition of drumming · phenomenon · British mainland North America, principally the Carolinas · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Congo Square, New Orleans
Enslaved and free people of African descent gathered on Sundays at the ground beyond Rampart Street to drum, dance, sing and trade; an 1817 municipal measure confined such gatherings to that plot; observers describe the bamboula and a pattern counted as three plus three plus two, and crowds of several hundred by 1819. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary across several public-history accounts; none was opened, and the 1817 measure is described in them variously as an ordinance and as a mayoral decree.
Smarthistory, with corroborating New Orleans public-history and broadcast accounts · Partly verified
smarthistory.org, "Congo Square, New Orleans"; and New Orleans Historical, item on Congo Square
Recorded on Congo Square, New Orleans
- The Stono Rebellion
- The South Carolina Negro Act prohibits drums
- New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square
- The first jazz record is made
- Alan Lomax records Jelly Roll Morton at the Library of Congress
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- Alan Lomax records Jelly Roll Morton at the Library of Congress · 1938
- The first jazz record is made · 1917-02-26
- The South Carolina Negro Act prohibits drums · 1740-05-10
- The Stono Rebellion · 1739-09-09